Melissa Myers views last week’s decision by the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority to reduce the toll on a contentious section of the soon-to-be-opened Gilcrease Turnpike as “a good start in the right direction.”
“We still have another month,” she said. “I’m hoping that Tulsa County and maybe the city and the OTA can sit down and talk and look at the options.”
The new toll road on the western edge of Tulsa will complete the gap from where the existing Gilcrease Expressway connects to Interstate 44 just south of 51st Street to just north of U.S. 412 at Edison Street west of downtown Tulsa. It is expected to open in about a month, nearly three years after construction began.
The Turnpike Authority last week set the toll for traveling the full length of the new roadway at $2.05 for vehicles with two axles using PikePass and $4.10 for PlatePay customers.
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The new turnpike is divided into three segments for toll purposes — from U.S. 412 to 21st Street, from 21st to 41st streets and from 41st to 51st streets.
Passenger vehicles not traveling the full length of the toll road will pay less, and the Turnpike Authority reduced the planned toll of 65 cents on the contentious southern leg to 40 cents with PikePass or 80 cents with PlatePay.
But vehicles with more than two axles will pay more.
And although Myers said she typically drives the 41st-to-51st section half a dozen times a day for personal errands — the road is free at present — it’s as a business owner that she’s angry about the conversion to a toll road.
She and her husband own Christ-Centered Lawn & Landscaping in Berryhill. The company has eight trucks, with four axles each, that deliver landscaping materials all across the Tulsa metro area.
“We’re not going to pay for four axles each time — times eight trucks,” she said last week, noting that a single round trip for just one truck on the 5-mile toll road would cost $8.20.
North of 41st Street, plenty of free-road options exist on which her trucks can travel, she said, adding that 41st itself is a wide, well-maintained road.
South of 41st, however, motorists who would want to avoid the turnpike’s high tolls have only two realistic options — 65th West Avenue or 49th West Avenue.
“You want us to go on 65th and 49th and make more big-truck traffic?” Myers asked. “Those two roads are residential, with no curbs or sidewalks or even a shoulder. …
“These two streets are not made for heavy traffic,” she said.
Megan Elliott, who, along with Myers, is leading a loose-knit coalition of Berryhill residents that’s fighting the toll road, lives within throwing distance of Chandler Park’s baseball fields, about eight miles from Charles Page High School in Sand Springs, where she works as a counselor.
Although her route to and from work doesn’t take her on the problematic 41st-to-51st stretch of the Gilcrease, that’s where her frustration lies “because there are no viable options. The frustration is (that it’s) isolating our community.”
Still, Elliott also likely will pay more for her daily commute soon. Just to use the northernmost segment of the turnpike for one round trip each day that school is in session will cost her more than $350 a year.
And with a son and daughter attending the same high school, she almost never gets by with only one round trip.
“I don’t have to use that (the turnpike), but I probably will,” she said. “It will be a quicker, easier commute. But that’s my choice.”
Elliott’s frustration is for the residents whose only choices besides a toll road are 49th and 65th west avenues, the former of which she said is colloquially referred to as “Cowbell Hill.”
As for the quarter decrease in the toll on the southern portion, “we’re frustrated,” she said. “That’s not what we asked for. We’re still fighting to eliminate the toll.”
Elliott said there’s “a viable solution that they (turnpike officials) won’t listen to — the perfect resolution is to eliminate the toll from 41st to 51st and add it to the (Arkansas River) bridge” section.
That’s the section Elliott will help pay for every time she uses the toll road to travel to or from the high school.
“I was not against the project from the beginning, but I am not in the majority when I say that,” she said last week. “I’m a public school educator. We have to have money. I understand tax money and tax revenue.
“I was not against the project until they said the whole road would have to be a toll road.
“It’s not our problem that they didn’t have enough money to build that road,” she said. “If you want to build a house, you build the house that you can afford.”
But building a highway is not the same thing as building a house.
“The Oklahoma Turnpike Authority is the only transportation-related infrastructure entity (in the state) that takes out a loan to build something and then recoups the money to pay for the loan from the users,” Deputy Director Joe Echelle said Friday.
Echelle told the crowd at an April public meeting on the subject at the Chandler Park Community Center that the city of Tulsa had a plan in 2014 to complete the project without tolls but that it would have taken 20 years.
Today, a dozen years sooner, the toll road is about to open to traffic.
That’s only true because a lot of pieces fell into place just so, he said, not the least of which was a 30-year loan through the federal Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act with a 1.35% interest rate and a four-year deferral to begin making payments.
The cost of the Gilcrease has been cited at $340 million, but Echelle said the figure rises to more than $360 million when previous investments are included.
Financing aside, though, there are still issues with options the Berryhill residents have proposed, he said.
One proposal Myers supports is a plan in which residents in certain ZIP codes would have special PikePass accounts that wouldn’t result in a charge for travel on that stretch of the road.
Echelle said such a plan would violate the federal Interstate Commerce Act, which demands equity in the application of laws, as well as the Turnpike Authority’s interoperability agreements with Texas and Kansas.
Those reciprocal pacts allow Texas’ TollTag customers, Kansas’ K-TAG customers and Oklahoma’s PikePass users to pay the same rates across all three states, which wouldn’t work if some Oklahoma users got a discount on one section of a road in Oklahoma.
“It’s also potentially a breach of our trust agreement, because we told the feds we’d be charging everybody,” Echelle said.
Removing the toll entirely from that one-mile stretch of road might seem like a simple solution, but “if the agreement had been that we were not going to charge a toll on that section, then the whole project would not have been built,” he said, “because the amount we would have had to charge on the rest of it would have been impossible.“
Echelle said the OTA routinely works with a nationally recognized traffic consultant to determine the maximum tolls that can be charged on a road and still keep the costs viable for motorists.
“In this case, the consultant could not recommend lowering it beyond (40 cents) because to raise it more on the other sections would drive people away,” he said.
“We charge a toll to pay off bonds” and pay expenses, “not to set aside money for other projects,” he added, noting that salt and sand costs millions of dollars for snow and ice mitigation during the winter, for example.
“We pay for that utilizing toll roads.”
Echelle praised the intergovernmental cooperation that is allowing the Gilcrease Turnpike to come to fruition, adding that Tulsa County, the city of Tulsa and the Indian Nations Council of Governments “have been excellent partners to get this project built.”
But he sounded a note of his own frustration, too.
“For the largest infrastructure project in the state to be right there (in) Tulsa and it not be a celebratory ribbon-cutting, I think that’s a shame.”
